When Jaime and Candice Henderson started work on their 385-square-foot house in August 2017, they didn’t realize what an undertaking it would become, from working around their 2-year-old daughter’s schedule to finding enough dirt to fill in the “hobbit house” that’s situated partially underground.

The kitchen area of Jaime and Candice Henderson's hobbit house featured on HGTV's "Tiny Paradise."(Photo: Donna Isbell Walker)

The living area of Jaime and Candice Henderson's hobbit house featured on HGTV's "Tiny Paradise."(Photo: Donna Isbell Walker)

The patio area of Jaime and Candice Henderson's hobbit house featured on HGTV's "Tiny Paradise."(Photo: Donna Isbell Walker)

But their patience and hard work paid off, and the result was showcased on Friday’s episode of the HGTV series “Tiny Paradise.”

Jaime, who’s an architect with LS3P in Greenville, designed the house to have the feel of a larger home, with a bedroom separate from the living area, and a shower that’s wide enough for the user to stretch out both arms.

“A lot of the tiny houses that you see are just one space, and the bedroom is usually like a lofted space, and we really wanted there to be a separate room,” Candice said in an interview earlier this week.

The house, situated on the Hendersons’ nine-acre farm in Fletcher, North Carolina, has a patio area — complete with fire pit, hot tub and mountain view — that’s almost as large as the interior space.

In designing the structure, they liked “the idea of making it a hobbit house mainly because we didn’t want it to interfere with the landscape of our property,” said Candice, who teaches chemistry and geology at A-B Tech in Asheville. “What sort of materials are going to sustain over 30, 40 years.”

There were a few snags along the way. First of all, they didn’t have enough dirt to bury the house into the side of the hill.

“We excavated out of the side of the hill, built the structure, and then we had somebody come in to bury it,” she said. “We initially thought we were going to bury it by hand, with our friends, with some shovels and some pizzas. And then we thought, ‘Maybe we should get an excavator.’ And he pushed all the dirt in, and it didn’t even cover like a third of the walls, so excavation we initially thought was going to take a day, took three days. We pulled dirt from another part of our property, 40 truckloads of dirt. … That was intense.”

“It was definitely an experience because I work. My husband works full-time in Greenville, so he drives to Greenville every day, and we had a 1½- to 2½ -year-old, and we were building this. So we were building this thing on the weekends. We were building it at night after my daughter went to bed. We were building at her naps, whenever we could squeeze it in and try and get it done.”